


the morningstar

by CloudDreamer



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: (Well more about the hellmouth in general but that's not a tag), Chronic Illness, Hellmouth Opening, Hellmouth Sunbeams (Blaseball Team), Horror, Implied/Referenced Ableism, Temperature Metaphors, That are also literal, Unnatural Disasters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 12:41:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28974537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: laurel stares into the sun.
Kudos: 6





	the morningstar

She has always liked the sun. She is fairly certain about this.

It has been a reassuring presence in her life. A ward against the creatures that come out in the cold of night, so eager to warm skin that’s perpetually on the edge of freezing. Circulation problems, the doctors said, just part of so many of the things about the body she exists inside of that do not function as intended. She nodded and moved on, addressing each issue as it came up. 

A dislocated shoulder is popped back into place repeatedly. A heart races. A gut is unsettled. That much is a sign of anxiety, almost certainly. She is, according to her body, a very anxious person. But she doesn’t feel it. All she feels is the cold in her bones and the sun that wants to warm it.

She dreams of endless summers, the division between day and night undone, and sticky sweat running down her forehead. It is a memory and a prophecy all at once. She doesn’t know how long she has dreamed of the perpetual light. She doesn’t know if she has ever dreamed of anything less. She doesn’t want to know. This is what she holds onto, in the long nights and the winter storms. The future without cold is a future without fear. 

She is afraid. 

She tries not to be. She puts her words together carefully, crafting messages that shouldn’t offend, but she is imperfect. She doesn’t know how to please. She is told off for being creepy, but there won’t be any creepy when the light consumes the land. When the screaming winds cease. it is only a dream, she tells herself when she feels good. When the first woman is in her bed, when they hold hands. But then that woman can’t meet her eyes, and she wishes it was something more. It’s not like there was an obligation there, she reminds herself. There is nothing wrong with goodbyes. 

It wasn’t abandonment. It wasn’t anything dangerous, and it could always be dangerous. There’s nobody to blame, no reason to be angry. Just because they weren’t compatible, that doesn’t mean she needs to cry. And she doesn’t cry. She just keeps looking off into the distance, for hours at a time, and feeling something twist in her chest. It’s like there’s something rotten inside her. Wilting. She is wilting without the sun. 

The sun is up in the sky, but it is too far away. Too far away for her to reach up for it, too far away for it to embrace her, and she needs that embrace. She needs it more than she needs water. There is a tug at her gut, pulling her towards something, but that something is not there. It is buried beneath layers of skin and sand. The sand stretches across this land like a weighted blanket, covering something alive. Something breathing. She can almost hear it breathing. Can almost feel its touch on her skin, but then she wakes, and she is cold again.  
Until. 

And it is an until, as she has always known. As she has yearned for and feared in equal measure. She knows the day has come when she dreams, for the first time, not of the endless summers but of the sound of pages turning and a great scream from a mouth too vast to comprehend. She does not fear the earthquake she wakes to. She knows, deep in her bones, that this is what she’s been waiting for. 

The body that has always felt wrong, even as she’s worked to change it on her own, is calling out to the flesh that pushes up at the ground beneath her feet. She would dig her way down to join it, but she hears cries outside. She knows she must help with the evacuation, help push out those who this place does not call out to, because just as the old world would burn her, this place will burn them. 

The glare of the sun is so bright as she steps out into the street, wearing torn up pajamas. Little scratches cross her shoulders and back, where little things had torn through, but they’re nothing like the gouges she sees on some of these people fleeing. They are chaotic, bloody messes, and she is horrified at what her apotheosis will have cost, convinced once a moment that her yearnings have brought what lies beneath the earth that is now yawning open to the surface. There is no time to think of self recrimination, however, and she reaches out to the man that was her neighbor. He is standing still, mouth open in horror as cracks run like spiderwebs through buildings believed to be sturdy. They were not prepared for this. They were not built for this.

She knows, like she knew this day would come, that he will not fear her touch like she might fear a stranger coming too close. It will rouse him from his panic, and he will gladly take anyone’s authority, even the not-a-girl he had once whispered about to people when he thought she could not hear. Or perhaps he will accept her authority because her eyes shine as gold as the sun that burns. 

And it does burn now. 

It burns as it has always meant to, and those who are not wanted feel its heat as oppression. 

Laurel feels it as acceptance.


End file.
